Pulseaudio

[Karl Larsen]

    Pulseaudio is an interesting old way to allow audio to be carried or 
duplicated and perhaps other useful things. I am an Electrical Engineer 
and studied the idea of mixing a lot of audio signals on a high 
frequency. This is what Mr.Lennart Poettering  is trying to do with what 
he calls Pulseaudio. I don't know just how it is done but it does work.

    I got Pulseaudio working on my Fedora 8 operating system and it 
appeared to be working properly, but I didn't know enough about it to 
test many features. But I did discover that two non-Fedora applications 
called Skype and gMFSK will not function with Pulseaudio in operation.

    This problem I ask Lennart at Pulseaudio and he said this:

On Thu, 10.01.08 09:13, Karl Larsen (k5di at zianet.com) wrote:

 > >     I got pulseaudio working on F8 and the normal audio on movies and
 > > such is fine. But I tried gMFSK which is an application that uses the
 > > sound-card DSP engine. It looks fine but when I try to receive digital
 > > data it suffers very bad interference and it will not transmit because
 > > it says /dev/dsp is busy.

gMFSK seems to be a program that uses OSS (/dev/dsp) directly. For
those you have two options:

1) Use "padsp" to redirect it to PA. Just prefix your application call
   with "padsp".

2) Use "pasuspender" to temporarily tell PA to give up access to the
   audio device. This is probably the better way to fix this if you
   need lowest-possible latencies. (I am not sure if you need those,
   but I assume so, given this seems to be some modem sw?)

 > >     Sype comes up fine and appears to receive data but when I try to
 > > call anyone or answer a call they can't hear me at all, and all I hear
 > > is noise.

Skype is closed source software. It's very difficult to get this
working out of the box for you, due to its nature.

http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#Skype

Lennart

-- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net 
ICQ# 11060553 http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 
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    I did both things and neither got my gMFSK or Skype working. There 
is more to this than I have knowledge of.


    This problem caused me to delete all the pulseaudio from my F8 
computer with yum remove *pulseaudio" which was a huge list! I did it 
and nothing worked on the F8 system after that. I had to re-load F8 and 
it came up working fine. But now, after removing the pulseaudio software 
I cannot yum vlc from livna any more.

    Pulseaudio is a big error in my opinion. It does nothing a normal 
user of Fedora wants but raises all kinds of issues with other software. 
I really think Fedora needs to leave Pulseaudio off it's systems.

Karl

-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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